Innovation and Entrepreneurship in theHospitality Industry

The hospitality industry has undergone tumultuous changes in the last five years. Competitive pressures, shifting consumer preferences and consumption patterns, technological advances, consolidation, price
discounting, and new distribution channels are but a few of the changes in
the business landscape. Innovation has been championed as a way to cope
with these and other changes in the industry. But what exactly is innovation,
how has it functioned in the hospitality industry and what are the key ideas
to help foster innovation?

The ‘Lighthouse Model’

The Lighthouse Model above provides a powerful metaphor to visualize the role and positioning of the Professorship Innovation in Hospitality within its ‘real (hospitality) world research context’. Modern lighthouses have changed in role from their historical predecessors. Although their function has changed, lighthouses continue to play an important role in navigation around the world. Lighthouses have been used for thousands of years as navigational aids, and they have supplied a means for outside guidance. Over time, people have begun to use the lighthouses to orient themselves, recognizing particular lighthouses and using them as a frame of reference to figure out where they are and where they need to go. The signal of the lighthouse is marked on charts, allowing sailors to use the light patterns in their finding of direction. The professorship will establish a clearly visible position within the hospitality industry and signal its research intentions and research findings. Connecting to the hospitality industry by beaming a light (enlightenment) of research will be an important aim for the professorship. The professorship intends to provide a beacon to the professional hospitality world, a light that will be considered as ‘giving direction’ in issues that challenge practitioners. By taking the lighthouse function, the professorship will be clearly visible for practitioners in the industry and simultaneously it will be crucial for hospitality management students to know where the contemporary challenges are within the industry.

Several developments are predicted for the coming years that will drive the future of the hospitality. Some of the key characteristics for success in the future are (Destors, 2010):

Deep understanding of an increasingly geographically, financially, generationally and attitudinally diverse and rapidly evolving customer base: an ever broader spectrum of customers with diverse needs will find the hospitality industry. Traditional segmentation models will no longer suffice to capture the needs and nature of tomorrow’s customer (connecting to the professorship theme ‘diversity’),

Continuous search for ancillary revenue streams: successful companies should consider a range of approaches to increase revenue generation (connecting to the professorship theme ‘value creation’). Firmly connecting to, and cooperating with the hospitality industry in producing meaningful research as element of innovation.

In hospitality research a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods are used. There appears, however, to be a tendency to produce work that at face value can present itself with a scientific outlook. Although quantitative research methods are more favoured, qualitative research in hospitality management is performed and gets published. The innovative direction for research in hospitality management can be found in adopting methods that are not so common in that field. Naturalistic research approaches involving grounded methods provide innovative opportunities for hospitality research. Naturalistic research, or inquiry, studies people in everyday circumstances by using observation or engaging in talking to them (Beuving & de Vries, 2015). A form of naturalistic research, grounded theory, has received a lot of attention in education and health studies but is only very limited applied in hospitality studies. Together with the even fewer used method ‘grounded action research’ (Simmons & Gregory, 2003), grounded theory can be considered as an example of real world grounded research approaches that have potentially great value to use in hospitality management. An example of using real world grounded research methods is provided by Gehrels (2014a) in which hospitality entrepreneurship is investigated in-depth. In this study the contextual characteristics of a specific group of entrepreneurs were explored and explained by using grounded theory. The study led to a social construct that explains what made the entrepreneurs successful and viable with the aim to have hospitality management education benefit from the knowledge in preparing students for employment.